


A Life You Never Meant

by Lavellington



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti)
Genre: During the 27 Years (IT), Everyone is Alive Except Georgie Denbrough, Internalized Homophobia, M/M, Sad Richie Tozier, Suicide, but it's an OC not one of the losers, did they cast renowned funnyman bill hader so that we could make Sad Richie Tozier a tag, except georgie, this fic is mostly just eddie and richie but jsyk everybody lives, wow glad that's a tag, wow that is also a tag
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-12-27
Updated: 2020-12-27
Packaged: 2021-03-11 02:35:19
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,951
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28344009
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lavellington/pseuds/Lavellington
Summary: The first real comedian that Richie ever met was a guy who told jokes at the same New York dive bar every Tuesday under the name Roger Washington.
Relationships: Eddie Kaspbrak/Richie Tozier
Comments: 4
Kudos: 14





	A Life You Never Meant

**Author's Note:**

> The opening of this story is heavily inspired by the first three pages of Michael Chabon’s Wonder Boys, which my parents gave me for Christmas, so if it seems familiar it’s because I’m a dirty plagiarist. I have yet to read the rest of WB, so any similarities beyond the opening are coincidental (and pretty unlikely - I may be capable of ripping off Michael Chabon on purpose but I doubt I could do it accidentally). 
> 
> Title from A Man/Me/Then Jim by Rilo Kiley.
> 
> See endnotes for content warnings. Disclaimer: the author has never seen Weekend at Bernie's.

_It's your gradual descent into a life you never meant_

_It's the slow fade of love_

_- **A Man/Me/Then Jim, Rilo Kiley**_

The first real comedian that Richie ever met was a guy who told jokes at the same New York dive bar every Tuesday under the name Roger Washington. He lived in the apartment above Richie’s family’s in Queens and his real name was Norman Greenbaum, a fact that Richie’s dad found hilarious for reasons a teenaged Richie could never be bothered to remember.

Roger Washington lived alone, in a constant fug of cigarette smoke, Old Spice and bourbon fumes. He could frequently be heard practicing his comedy routines in the uncarpeted room right above the Tozier’s kitchen, striding around the small space energetically. Richie’s mom would occasionally send Richie up there with a casserole or a bundt cake, when the moon was waning and the sounds and smells emanating from Roger’s apartment had ebbed sufficiently to allow her to feel briefly sorry for him. 

Richie liked to hang out up there sometimes, sitting on the lumpy brown couch and looking at the pictures of comedians Roger had taped on the walls - Lenny Bruce, George Carlin, Richard Pryor. He and Roger would shoot the shit, talk about their favourite SNL sketches and discuss the bootlegged Chris Rock tape Richie had got from some jerk in his high school, while Roger ate Richie’s mom’s casserole straight from the dish, peeling back the foil and standing over the sink. 

Roger would sometimes perform his routines for Richie, on which occasions Richie would dutifully play the part of the enraptured audience, wondering if his parents could hear his slightly-too-loud laughter from downstairs in their kitchen. Some of the jokes were pretty racy (and in hindsight, pretty sexist), and sometimes Richie wondered when his parents would look up from the TV, blink, and absolutely flip their shit at the realisation that their 16-year-old son spent two or three evenings a week hanging out with the raunchy comedian upstairs. This was the greatest joke of all: the idea that his parents would focus on Richie long enough to form an opinion on his leisure activities. If it was Richie’s sister they would have put a stop to it pretty fast. One time when Richie was feeling irritable and not in the mood to sit upstairs and inhale Roger’s secondhand despair, he’d said with archetypal teenage belligerence, “Why can’t Jo bring him his goddamn casserole?” 

His father cuffed him round the head the best he could while Richie was slumped almost horizontal on the couch.

“We’re not sending your sister up to a strange man’s apartment by herself! The guy could be a pervert.”

Richie thought that this logic, which probably seemed perfectly sound to them, neatly showcased his parents’ lack of imagination.

Not that he thought that Roger was actually a pervert, but Richie was pretty sure he was queer, and he was  _ definitely  _ sure that his parents wouldn’t want him going up there if they knew that. 

Sometimes when Richie knocked on Roger’s door, he’d answer it unwashed, with tired hangdog eyes, wearing a skew-buttoned shirt with three-day-old stains. On those evenings he was maudlin, moving slowly, picking at his food. He didn’t tell any jokes. He talked a lot about his dead dog, and also some guy named Tommy, who Richie gathered was the owner of the shitty comedy bar where Roger performed every Tuesday. Apparently Tommy was a giant pain in Roger’s ass: always bugging him to make his material better, trying to get him to cut back on cigarettes, not-so-delicately hinting that Roger should shower more, all of which Richie thought was pretty decent and germane advice. 

He couldn’t put his finger on how or when he knew that Roger was in love with Tommy, but he would have staked his life on it being true. Whenever he thought about it, whenever he wondered for a moment if he’d made the whole thing up somehow, he saw in his mind Roger, stubble-bristled, trembling and bloodshot, cigarette hanging from his mouth, cutting himself off mid-sentence and turning away like he’d said too much, presenting Richie with wispy grey-brown hair and a slowly reddening ear. He’d picked up the thread of the conversation after a second, never at a loss for words for long. But Richie always remembered him in that pause, hanging suspended in that moment of fear and sadness and exhaustion that called to something inchoate in Richie’s skinny adolescent chest.

He wasn’t exactly surprised when he heard that Tommy had died in February ‘94 and the next day his dad found Roger slumped insensate against the Toziers' door. He was so sick he was grey almost all over, his dirty hair and his stubble and the skin around his red-rimmed eyes.

Richie’s dad, whom Richie had recently taken to calling Wentworth to annoy him, slid his forearms under Roger’s rank armpits and instructed Richie to grab his feet. Since the elevator was perpetually out of order, they hauled him up two flights of stairs, both father and son panting from exertion. Richie listened to his dad’s laboured breathing and looked at Roger’s yellow-stained fingers – a splash of colour on his concrete skin – and thought he should really quit smoking while he was ahead. 

‘Buck up, Wentworth,’ he said aloud. He tried to keep his breathing even as he said it, knowing that would annoy his dad even more. ‘Nearly there. Hey, have we checked this isn’t like, a Weekend at Bernie’s situation?’

His dad slumped against the stairway wall, wheezing and lowering Roger to the ground. He flapped his hand at Richie to signal that he needed a break, either from the physical labour or from Richie’s commentary. Probably both.

Richie hitched up his too-baggy jeans and waited for his father to regain the power of speech, surreptitiously looking down at Roger for signs of life. He would actually be pretty bummed if the old dude was dead, jokes aside. But if you were a Tozier you couldn’t say something reckless like “jokes aside” and expect to escape unscathed, so he persisted with his enquiries the only way he knew how.

‘Because I gotta be honest with you, I don’t see this version of the story yielding much in the way of comedy  _ or  _ profits.’ 

‘He’s… he’s not dead.’ his dad said, still breathing funny, wiping his forearm across his forehead. ‘I checked that before I asked my second born child to come and help me carry him up the stairs.’

‘And I appreciate that,’ Richie said. ‘Really, I do. Top drawer parenting, Went.’

‘Shut up, Richie,’ his dad said, pushing himself away from the wall with an effort. ‘Grab his feet again.’

‘Roger that,’ Richie said, bending over to grasp Roger’s ankles. His dad rolled his eyes.

‘Okay, wiseass. On three.’

  
  


*

  
  


The next day Roger was full of apologies for the trouble he’d caused. He showed up at their door – fully conscious and upright this time – holding a comically drooping bouquet of flowers and wearing a relatively clean shirt to apologise to Richie’s parents. His mother didn’t invite him in, standing with her hand on the half-open door as Roger stumbled through an apology, Richie making faces at him over his mom’s shoulder. When he explained to Richie’s mom that a dear friend of his had recently passed away, Richie fell back, feeling guilty and also kind of queasy.

When he was done his mother took the flowers from his sweaty grip, thanked him, and shut the door gently but firmly. Richie didn’t say anything as she walked past him into the kitchen.

‘Mags,’ Richie’s dad said as he sat down to his shrivelled meat and potatoes that evening, ‘should I be worried that you have a very inept suitor?’ He nodded at the straggly flowers, propped up half-heartedly in a blue ceramic vase on the kitchen table.

‘Oh,’ his mom sighed, hand on her hip as she looked at the flowers with an air of faint disappointment she usually aimed at Richie. ‘They’re from Mr Greenbaum upstairs. He wanted to apologise for yesterday. He said he’s recently suffered a bereavement, and he’s not himself.’

‘I’d say he was very strikingly himself,’ his dad said, sawing at his lamb chop with unconcern. ‘If you ask me he could do with being a little less himself, especially before lunchtime.’

‘He was very polite, Wentworth,’ Richie’s mom said, reproachfully. She always got more forgiving about stuff like this when it gave her the chance to look more Christian than somebody.

‘Yeah, Wentworth.’ Richie said, waggling his eyebrows from the other side of the table.

‘Richie, do your homework,’ his mom said, absently.

Richie sighed and went back to trig.

‘You know,’ his mom said, ‘I feel bad for him. I think I’ll send Richie up again tomorrow with a lasagne. The man can’t live on bourbon alone.’

Wentworth hummed agreeably around his mouthful.

‘Wow,’ Richie muttered. ‘Next time you’re mad at me remind me to bring you some shitty ass dead flowers.’

‘Richie,’ both of his parents said, in perfect unison and near-identical exasperation. Richie sighed noisily and hunched lower over his homework.

‘If you think it’s best, Mags,’ his dad said, as if there’d been no interruption, ‘I think it’s a great idea.’

‘I feel bad for him,’ his mom said again. Richie, as much as he enjoyed hanging out with Roger and listening to his impressive collection of comedy albums, suddenly felt unaccountably angry. His grip on his pencil tightened.

‘Yeah,’ his dad agreed, chasing a pea around his plate. ‘Poor old Norman.’

  
  


*

  
  


The next day Richie’s mom made two lasagnas and two batches of brownies, which in their apartment was kind of like Mardi Gras or something. Richie got home from school, smelled the delicious brownie goodness, and elbowed past his sister – ‘ _ watch  _ it, fuckface!’ – to shuffle into the kitchen on his tippy toes, nose in the air. 

‘What is that?’ his mother said, squinting at him. ‘What are you doing?’

‘I’m being like –’ Richie dropped down onto the soles of his feet. ‘I’m doing that thing cats do, in cartoons. When there’s, like, a pie cooling on a windowsill.’

‘Oh,’ his mother said, going back to the tray of brownies. ‘Well, you can have some after dinner.  _ And  _ after you’ve finished your homework.’

Richie groaned from the depths of his being.

‘Richie, shut up,’ his mom said, as his sister yelled something similar from the hallway. ‘And go and leave your backpack and your books in your room, I need you to take some of these upstairs to Mr Greenbaum.’

‘Roger,’ Richie said, and swung around to clump down the hall to his room before anyone could tell him to shut up again.

He was never sure why that day of all days his mom decided to go all out and send Roger dessert too, but either way Richie trudged up the stairs balancing two saran wrapped dishes instead of one, whistling a vaguely remembered hip-hop song the kids across the street had been listening to on a battered but serviceable boombox when he walked past them on his way home, and he dropped both dishes when he pushed the door open and found Roger slumped on his threadbare couch with a neat, black-rimmed hole in his head.

  
  


*

  
  


In the bad old days of 2012, Richie did a fluffy, quickfire interview with a forgettable, pretentious comedy zine who asked about his formative comedy influences. He reeled off all the usual names, even managing to casually drop in the fact that he’d been out drinking with a couple of them in the last four years since his career had really taken off, and then for some reason at the end of the laundry list of SNL alumni, he mentioned Roger Washington. He’d never talked about Roger to anyone, and he thought of him pretty rarely, but listing out his teenage comedy heroes stirred up memories of listening to  _ Dangerous  _ and  _ Born Suspect  _ in a haze of cigarette smoke with the only person he then knew who even remotely shared his sense of humour.

‘I don’t know that name,’ the girl with the undercut said, tapping in a leisurely way at her ipad. ‘Is he New York-based?’ 

‘Uh, yeah,’ Richie said vaguely, already feeling weird about bringing up Roger Washington on the record, in front of other people. ‘He never really – he was mostly on the club circuit in like, the early 90s.’

He changed the subject to the first time he hung out with Adam Sandler, a story which always reliably killed with everyone from his grandma to his barber to that guy he picked up in a bar one time, and undercut girl laughed, and tapped on her screen some more. 

Two weeks later, when Richie had all but forgotten about the interview, the zine released the article and suddenly people were talking about Roger Washington.

  
  


*

  
  


Undercut girl, whose name it turned out was Hannah Whitney, wrote the following:

_ ‘Tozier, who is known for his riotous, bawdy humour cited (amongst others) comedian Roger Washington as a formative comedic influence. Washington, a regular on the New York comedy club circuit from the mid-80s to the early 90s, was often criticised for his sexist and homophobic humour. A 1990 review in the Village Voice describes Washington’s comedy as “sexually aggressive...bordering on predatory”. By 1992 Washington had mostly faded from the New York comedy scene, except for regular performances at The Underside Comedy Club in Brooklyn, which was owned by Washington’s long time friend and erstwhile improv partner, Tommy Clarke. Washington, who was known to suffer from alcohol and drug addiction, was found dead in his Queens apartment on February 19th, 1994, just 4 days after Tommy Clarke’s death from congenital heart failure.  _

_ It seems that Washington’s death went largely unremarked, with his contemporaries presumably skittish of eulogising a man who described female comedians as “retribution on all men for the invention of the push-up bra”. It’s hard not to wonder at Tozier’s choice of comedy hero: a washed-up misogynist who is remembered – when he is remembered at all – firmly on the wrong side of comedy history. Those who hold out hope that Tozier will move away from his hackneyed, offensive gags and focus more on his clever and often surreal anecdotes based around his life in Los Angeles seem likely to be disappointed if his lauding of Roger Washington is any indication.’ _

Richie skimmed the article on his phone while he was waiting for his ironically homosexual Starbucks order, and cursed loudly. Steve was going to have his  _ balls  _ for this. 

‘Caramel macchiato for Wentworth?’ the barista called. Richie sighed through his nose and shoved his phone in his jeans pocket. He was feeling suddenly queasy, his twitter mentions were ratcheting into quadruple digits, and the thought of drinking his body weight in caramel syrup somehow no longer seemed appealing.

  
  


*

  
  


Although it was far from the most controversial thing he had ever said in an interview, the Roger thing stuck around and became yet another stick for the press to beat Richie with, which made Richie feel bad for too many reasons to count. The whole thing afterwards became so tangled up in Richie’s head with a) his ongoing fights with Steve on the topic of “damage control” and “rebranding”, b) his own ruthlessly suppressed sexuality and c) his nebulous childhood trauma, that whenever anyone brought it up in subsequent interviews, he simply got up and walked out. When word got out that Richie was perfectly willing to do this and didn’t care if it got him blacklisted from fucking People Magazine, the press mostly stopped mentioning Roger to him directly. They did, however, draw snide parallels between the two mens’ careers in reviews of Richie’s shows, presumably with the coy implication that Richie would one day also tank his career and drink himself into an early grave. Richie ignored it approximately as hard as he ignored his crush on Bradley Cooper, and got on with his life.

So he really shouldn’t have been surprised that Eddie Kaspbrak asked him about it less than an hour after they all escaped the Derry sewer system for what was hopefully the final time. Standing waist-deep in quarry water, he managed to say, ‘You’ve really been following my career, huh, Eds?’ without vomiting, as his brain lit up with a series of connections between Eddie, Roger, Tommy, Richie’s comedy career, and about 85% of his psychological hang-ups.

Eddie held his gaze, hand rising in an abortive movement towards the bandage on his own face. He lowered his hand and shrugged.

‘Yeah,’ he said, ‘I guess. I think part of me somehow knew I would one day have two decades of roasting you to make up for.’

Richie scrubbed a hand through his hair, huffing out a laugh. This was the part where he would usually bail, but he found himself unwilling or maybe unable to move. Steve had tried all kinds of threats and incentives to get Richie to behave in interviews and on live TV, but when it came down to it Richie had never cared enough about the consequences to make himself say or do anything he really didn’t want to. Richie was used to people being disappointed in him – even disgusted by him – and Steve couldn’t realistically bankrupt him or stop him buying booze and pop tarts, so he really had nothing over Richie at all.

He looked at Eddie now, filthy and exhausted and washed out of all colour as he swayed in the murky water, and thought Steve could never be allowed to meet him. 

**Author's Note:**

> CW: Alcoholism, callous and flippant attitude towards alcoholism from Richie's dad, portrayal of intoxication, internalised homophobia, use of queer not as an outright slur but definitely in a questionable manner, Richie's family being lowkey mean to him, Richie being roasted by the media, depression and suicide (not a major character), the media being callous about alcoholism and depression. Please let me know in the comments if there's anything you think I should add.


End file.
